Digital Illumination

         A picture is worth a thousand words: the phrase emerged in the U.S. in the 20th century and is attributed to Fredick R. Barnard who attributed it to an unnamed Japanese philosopher. Although the origin is unknown, the phrase or a variation has been used in a variety of print sources ranging from advertisements for Doan's Backache Pills to The American Journal of Education 1858 to a Turgenev novel. The idea that text alone may be an insufficient form of expression is an old one and shared by many.

       Richard Lanham notes that "when the rich vocal and gestural language of oral rhetoric was constricted into writing and then print, the effort to preserve it was concentrated into something classical rhetoricians called ecphrasis, dynamic speaking-pictures in words." (Lanham 34) Viewed in this light, reliance on text alone for expression or information exchange is a massive simplification -- even suppression -- of elements included in prehistoric narrative tradition.   That is not to say that text isn’t extremely valuable, Guttenberg’s press introduced an era of mass communication which altered societal structure forever, only that the meaning that text conveys can be expanded or improved by the addition of visual elements.

William Blake (1757-1827) 

     Artists have long been layering elements to deepen meaning.  The presence of an image in the illuminated work is only part of the visual expression.   The text in the illuminated work violates a convention of the literate society, that the text must be transparent so the reader " forgets about its physical aspects and reads right through to the meaning beneath." (Lanham 33) The text in the illuminated work is opaque; the size, color and shape of the letters are chosen by the artist as part of the communication so we must look at as well as through the them to get the message.  Manipulation of the size, color, order, direction or style of text provoke a process wherein we experience a reality that is customarily relegated to the periphery. Lanham's discussion of Burke's "Flowerishes" points out that we don't really notice the convention--we read left to right-- until we are forced to read " top to bottom as well as left to write, back to front, in a circle..." (Lanham 35) The presence of an unconventional form triggers a process of "orientation" during which we interact differently with the material.  We may be aware of the physicality of the material: the size, color, weight or thickness of the book.  We may have to move, turn or reposition ourselves or the object in order to understand the material.  In short, our role changes from passive beholder to active participant in a process of understanding. 

     Opportunities for experimentation with text opacity or layering elements have increased exponentially due to technological innovation.  Blake created his illuminated works by inventing and implementing a process of etching copper plates with acid, hand inking and printing. I'd venture to say, very few among us would be able-- or willing -- to match that feat.  Luckily, we don't have to.  With a click of the mouse we can go from this to this to this to this. If we don't like it, another click of the mouse removes the formatting.  This is an extremely simplistic example to illustrate the point  that the choices available to us are unprecedented. Some see this availability as detrimental to expression; the dystopian humanist view might say that our reliance on these choices offered by technology damage our writing process by diverting our concentration from content to form.  In other words, the ability to manipulate the appearance of things diverts our attention from the meaning that we attempt to convey.  This view ignores the premise that the physical representation of the text is important to its meaning.  It also portrays technology and computers as tools which can be used to write but are somehow separate from the writing/creating process.  They are not separate, rather they offer an avenue for  synthesis between human and machine and lead to a posthumanist view that " The body matters. The material matters. Physicality (for example, of the body) is not secondary to form, or mind, or language....it is, rather, fundamental." ( Porter 388) We are breaking no new ground by incorporating visual elements into text or making text opaque; rather we are going back to our roots when oral tradition added meaning through sound, tone and visual elements. 
      Despite our having a long tradition of layering literacies, plain text on plain paper seems to us the most serious and suitable for academia.  However, the proliferation of other literacies and hybridizations demand attention, explanation or, at the very least, acknowledgement.  Stroupe notes that the "discipline needs to decide not only whether to embrace the teaching of visual and information design in addition to verbal production, which some of the more marginalized elements of English Studies have already done, but, more fundamentally to confront its customary cultural attitudes toward visual discourses and their insinuation into verbal texts." (Stroupe 608) Common cultural attitudes toward the insinuation of visual elements into verbal texts range from contempt to fear and tend to see the disparate elements in conflict with each other rather than a cohesive, expressive whole.  These conventions dictate that words look like this -- Lost.  They don't look like this:

Not like this!

     These conventions don't admit the educational efficacy of information presented in this fashion despite that fact that the text is directly quoted from Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Q:  How does the addition of the visual element make the text less reliable?

 A: It doesn't.